Process question

[X-Fan]

G'day all,

I've been having a little trouble with my forums of late. Every night (my time, early morning US time) the site slows down to almost a crawl and my only recourse is to reboot the server. It's only started happening recently, and I haven't added any new hacks or changed anything so I don't know what could be causing it.

The bizarre thing is it happens when my site has very few visitors. When my site is busy, it runs fine! I'm really scratching my head here.

Each time I check the processes running on theserver by using the top command, I'm seeing something like this:

25883 root 9 0 756M 88M 18084 D 0.1 17.7 2:42 analog

What exactly is that process, what does it do, and could it be the cause of the problem?

[Raz Meister]

Thats a weblog analyzer. Search google for more info on it.

I personally would disable it, as it is using over 750Mb of memory!

If you want to disable it, login as root and type "crontab -e" and comment out (with #) the line that corresponds to 'analog'.

[X-Fan]

I just logged in as root and there's no crontab file (crontab -l came back as "no crontab for root").

What else can I do to stop it from happening?

[Raz Meister]

look in /etc/cron.daily

[X-Fan]

Ah, okay, found the file and changed its permissions to be non-executable, but the analog process is still running.

Help!

[Raz Meister]

Move it out of that directory, and do a 'killall analog'

[X-Fan]

My site host just informed me that they require that process to run, and recommended I renice its priority.

However, I'm clueless as to how to do that! Can someone help, please?

[kippesp]

My site host just informed me that they require that process to run, and recommended I renice its priority.

However, I'm clueless as to how to do that! Can someone help, please?

Edit the file and place 'nice' in front of the analog commend. So perhaps 'nice analog' would do it.

I'd also check the output of analog--the HTML output. If it is configured to do hits by IP, that can take awhile if it is doing DNS lookups. I've since removed analog because it was hard on the server--but I remember well how slow it could be with DNS lookups enabled.

[Raz Meister]

Add 'nice -19' in front on the command that runs analog. This will reduce its priority to the lowest possible.

[Erwin]

Yeah, those weblog processes can chew up memory. Same with your service logs - make sure logrotate is working as well. :)